Birth of The Cool

Newport Beach, Calif.

:Nobody does Modernism the way California does. Yet its depth and breadth had gone largely unexplored until Orange County Museum of Art curator Elizabeth Armstrong decided to build an exhibition around a group of West Coast painters known as the Abstract Classicists.

Working at midcentury, they had fallen under the influence of Modernism as it was practiced in the "sunshine and noir" atmosphere of Southern California. "The hard-edged paintings of the Abstract Classicists have a certain affinity with California's Modernist architecture," Armstrong explained. "It is undeniable when you compare them to [Julius] Shulman's photographs of the Case Study Houses."

Believing that other forms of art and popular culture were also informed by the principles of Modernism but not tracked in the context of the larger movement, Armstrong assembled an advisory committee. Experts in the popular arts — film, graphic design, music and culture — surfaced examples of Modernism across the disciplines, some as early as the pre-World War II years. By the late 1940s, Modernism was an accepted aspect of every working artist's vocabulary. By 1959, it was an ingrained part of the American way of life.

Taking that seminal year as their timeline — 1959 was, after all, the year Frank Lloyd Wright died and the Guggenheim opened; it was also the year Walter Gropius was awarded the AIA's Gold Medal and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe received the Royal Gold Medal — the experts, under Armstrong's leadership, mapped the impact of high Modernism on popular culture.

Spinning "cool" into its many connotations, "Birth of The Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury," on view at the Orange County Museum of Art, presents a vision of Modernist theory and application as it moved from "cool" — some would say cold — aesthetic of pure rationality and logic to the laid-back "cool" of the hipster.

Modernist collectors, viewing the show from a specially designed interactive installation that includes jazz lounge, media room, period art gallery and outdoor space, are more likely to call it red hot.

While the New York Armory Show of 1913 introduced the concepts of Modernism as seen through the eyes of Cubists and post-Impressionists, it was not until 1929 that California had its first experience with International Style. Richard Neutra, an Austrian refugee, who had studied with Adolf Loos, whose phrase "form follows function" has become shorthand for Modernist theory, and who was influenced by Otto Wagner, a leading Vienna Secessionist, provided the inaugural glimpse of the future when he completed Lovell House.

The cliffside home featured massive expanses of glass and balconies suspended from the roof frame by steel cables. A U-shaped concrete cradle nestled the suspended pool. Due to the location, plans for the house presented a construction nightmare. Neutra solved the challenges by having the home's skeleton fabricated in sections and trucked to the site, that in itself a breakthrough concept.

While Lovell House introduced America to International Style, it also introduced Los Angeles to Europeans. California became the Promised Land for a generation of talented European immigrants. In a matter of time, experiments in glass and steel designed by Raphael Soriano, Rudolf Schindler, Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig, among others, populated California's landscape.